Age of Wonders 3 - Hands-On Preview @ RPS

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has new preview of Age of Wonders 3 based on the games beta.

Is it unfair to hope for more than a solid sequel, with all the pieces seemingly in place? I was relieved when I accepted, a couple of hours in, that Triumph hadn’t diminished in the decade since Shadow Magic. The game feels safe – a riff on a formula successfully applied many times before – and there’s something to be said for sinking into a well-constructed game, with the growing certainty that it was built by solid, steady hands. But as draconians battled dwarves and dwarves battled elves, I found myself thinking of the weird humour and strange planes of Warlock II, and the sheer oddity of Eador: Masters of the Broken World. My mind even turned to the latest Fallen Enchantress game, which was the (presumably) final manifestation of a deeply flawed experiment.

Age of Wonders III isn’t weird, strange, odd or experimental. It’s also substantially less flawed than many of its apparent competitors. I expect it to absorb a great many happy hours when the final release arrives in the near future but I also expect that I’ll spend at least some of that time dreaming of worlds more wondrous and weird.

Thank you Thrasher for the link.